Axel Winter
Biography
Axel Winter received his PhD from the University of Hamburg, Germany in 2008 pioneering a laser-based femtosecond timing system which is now in routine operation at the European XFEL which improved the timing accuracy by more than 3 order of magnitude for which he received the EPS Accelerator Group Young Scientist Prize in 2006. He moved to the ITER Organization in 2009 as one of the first recipients of the Monaco Postdoctoral fellowships working on the design of the Plasma Control System for the world’s largest nuclear fusion facility currently under construction in southern France. He continued his tenure there as staff scientist until 2018 when he moved to the Max-Planck-Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald to become the division head for controls and IT for Wendelstein 7-X, the largest stellarator currently in operation. Together with his team, he completed the final integration phase of the control system and the first operation phases of the machine, leading to a 100% availability of the control system during the final operation phases in 2025. He moved back to ITER in 2026 to become the deputy program manager for the Commissioning and Integration Program, where he will oversee the controls and commissioning activities to bring ITER into operation.
Plenary Talk
This talk will provide an overview about the nuclear fusion landscape as of 2026 with special emphasis on magnetic confinement devices. There has been a lot of movement in the past 5 years, particularly with private funding entering the scene at a massive scale. The two main concepts, the Tokamak and Stellarator, will be introduced and their particular challenges outlined. The second part of the presentation will focus Instrumentation and Control and discuss these based on a few examples with emphasis on image acquisition and analysis. These will include shape and vertical stability control, density control and finally the protection of the first wall and divertor from overheating. As with many fields, artificial intelligence has also seen a huge popularity in fusion and the resulting impact and opportunities for control in fusion devices will also be discussed.